Coaching Edge
Rivers holds experience advantage over Celtics rookie head coach Mazzulla in Eastern Conference semifinal
CAMDEN, N.J. >> Pat Croce rarely saw anything that could ruin his feel-great spirit, but he would make an exception in the 1997 NBA offseason. That’s when not even he could take another game with Johnny Davis as the coach of the 76ers.
Then the team’s acting owner, Croce fired Davis, whose only coaching experience was six years as an NBA assistant. The former NBA guard coached the Sixers for one season and the results could not have been more unsightly had they been trying to lose - not that such nonsense wouldn’t occur a basketball generation later. But Larry Brown had just resigned after guiding the Pacers to consecutive Final Fours, and the impatient Croce asked Ed Snider for $25 million to make him the highest paid coach in the NBA – higher paid than even Pat Riley, Phil Jackson and Lenny Wilkens. John Calipari was making $3 million a year to coach the Nets at the time. Croce would give Brown five bills to come to Philadelphia.
“If I’ve learned anything.” Croce would say, “it is that with coaches in this league, experience is the gold standard.”
By 2001, Allen Iverson would have allowed himself to be coached by Brown and the Sixers were in the Finals. So, it had worked. It had worked because coaching in the NBA is a sophisticated science done at the highest levels by some of the greatest minds in sports. It is an endeavor that requires intense attention to play calls, switching defenses, matchups, tempo changes, endless sideline inbound challenges, ego massaging, millionaire coddling, roster building, time management, media savvy and detailed scouting
reports.
Doc Rivers, who this season has pushed the Sixers to 58 wins – four in the first round of the playoffs included – can do all of that. And by Monday, he will take his 1,305 career wins into an NBA Eastern Conference semifinal series against Joe Mazzulla, 34, who stumbled into his position in September when the former Celtics coach, Ime Udoka, was alleged to have behaved inappropriately in the workplace.
Prior to that, the only head coaching Mazzulla had was at Fairmont State, a Division II college program. But he was promoted from assistant to the big chair. So it’s Doc Rivers vs. Joe Mazzulla for a spot in the conference finals.
In that sport, that’s called a mismatch.
Not that rookie head coaches can’t win championships, because five have in the history of the league. Nick Nurse won one as recently as 2019, his Raptors bumping off the Sixers along the way. So did Paul Westhead, with the Lakers in 1980. The other three – Riley, Tyronn Lue and Steve Kerr – were NBA players, but so was Johnny Davis. Yet history says coaching experience is golden. And so did the Sixers’ performance against the Nets, when Rivers exposed the relative inexperience of his good friend and former player Jacque Vaughn from the Game 1 tip to the Nets’ disastrous Game 4 fourth quarter.
With an answer for everything Vaughn would plan – particularly that predictable and solvable trapping he tired against Joel Embiid – Rivers was in control throughout. Even when challenged to win an elimination game with Paul Reed as his center, he made certain that Brooklyn never had a chance. But what has made Rivers special this year has been his ability to assign roles and have his players – including a couple bound for the Hall of Fame – subscribe to every plan. Likely because Rivers has so many stars at the point where winning a championship is the only thing they have left to accomplish, the Sixers were a strangely content group of professionals, whether asked to start, play multiple positions, sit behind a forward who never scores or go in for a minute and foul. Even Rivers, who has won an NBA championship as a head coach, said he never had a team more focused on winning above anything else.
The series against Boston is complicated, particularly with the mystery surrounding the availability of Embiid. But if Embiid plays, the swirling wisdom that the Celtics are better, man for man, than the Sixers is false. And even if Embiid does not play early in the series, Rivers can keep it close to steal it at the end.
Should the Sixers lose, the choir of the chronically miserable will demand a coaching change. On one level, the discontent is approved, for the Sixers’ organization promised years of lengthy postseason success in exchange for years of rebuilding. That organization will deserve to be battered until it produces at least as many NBA semifinal seasons as it did tanked ones – the kind Pat Croce never would have tolerated. Unfortunately for Rivers, he will take some blame for that, even though he was nowhere near the place when Brett Brown was being made to play one season with 16 different point guards.
But this is a different time. When right, the Sixers have a rotation that can beat any team still standing and a coach who has been around long enough to know how to get that done.